Maxine Greene, 96, Dies; Education Theorist Saw Arts as Essential

Maxine Greene, a teacher and education theorist who promoted the arts as a fundamental learning tool and in nearly 50 years at Teachers College, Columbia University, became its resident Pied Piper, known for her persuasive scholarship, her vivid writing and her imbuing teaching with a spirit of endless adventure, died on May 29 at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.

“With the passing of Maxine Greene, Teachers College has lost its brilliant philosopher queen,” the president of the college, Susan Fuhrman, said in a statement.

Dr. Greene was a very public intellectual, the personification of ideas in the world. In addition to her post at Teachers College — she was William F. Russell Professor Emerita in the Foundations of Education and taught as recently as this spring — she was philosopher-in-residence at the Lincoln Center Institute, the educational arm of the performing arts center.

Her apartment on Fifth Avenue, not far from the Guggenheim and Metropolitan museums, was a salon welcoming of students, current and former, and reflective of a formidable sphere of influence that included the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire; Rika Burnham, head of education at the Frick Collection; the playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith; the writer Frank McCourt; and the educator and former radical activist Bill Ayers.

Dr. Greene was a prolific writer and lecturer on topics in education like multiculturalism and the power of imagination, and she was often cited as an intellectual descendant of the progressive thinker John Dewey.

An opponent of stringent academic standards as measured by testing and other classroom accountability theories, she extolled the virtues of the Thoreauvian concept she called “wide-awakeness,” though she was undeterred by the pessimism of Thoreau, who asserted that “the millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life.”

Dr. Greene believed that creative thinking and robust imagining were the keys not just to an individual’s lifelong learning but to the flourishing of a democratic society. She espoused the view that students could be taught and encouraged to engage the world not just as it is but as it might otherwise be.

“I am suggesting that, for too many individuals in modern society, there is a feeling of being dominated, and that feelings of powerlessness are almost inescapable,” Dr. Greene wrote in a 1978 essay, “Wide-Awakeness and the Moral Life.”

“I am also suggesting that such feelings can to a large degree be overcome through conscious endeavor on the part of individuals to keep themselves awake, to think about their condition in the world, to inquire into the forces that appear to dominate them, to interpret the experiences they are having day by day. Only as they learn to make sense of what is happening, can they feel themselves to be autonomous. Only then can they develop the sense of agency required for living a moral life.”

As a scholar, Dr. Greene is probably best known for her work in aesthetic education, arguing that the arts encourage a kind of thinking that best serves humankind.

“Not only ought young persons (in association with their teachers) be provided a range of experiences for perceiving and noticing,” she wrote in a 1981 essay, “Aesthetic Literacy in General Education.” “They ought to have opportunities, in every classroom, to pay heed to color and glimmer and sound, to attend to the appearances of things from an aesthetic point of view.

“If not, they are unlikely to be in a position to be challenged by what they see or hear; and one of the great powers associated with the arts is the power to challenge expectations, to break stereotypes, to change the ways in which persons apprehend the world.

“George Steiner has written that ‘Rembrandt altered the Western perception of shadow spaces and the weight of darkness. Since Van Gogh we notice the twist of flame in a poplar.’ We can say the same about alterations in our vision due to the work of writers ranging from Shakespeare to Sartre, alterations in our hearing due to composers from Bach to Schoenberg and John Cage. The point is that such perspectives do not open up spontaneously. The capacity to perceive, to attend, must be learned.”

Dr. Greene was born Sarah Maxine Meyer in Brooklyn on Dec. 23, 1917, to the former Lily Greenfield and Max Meyer, who owned a company that made costume jewelry. She attended the Berkeley School (now Berkeley Carroll School) in Brooklyn, graduated from Barnard College and earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy of education from New York University. She joined Teachers College in 1965 as the sole woman in the philosophy of education department.

An early marriage to Joseph Krimsley, a doctor, ended in divorce. Her 50-year marriage to Orville Greene, a patent lawyer, ended with his death in 1997. Dr. Greene is survived by a son, Timothy Greene; a stepdaughter, Elizabeth Greene; a sister, Jeanne Shinefield; and a grandson. A daughter, Linda Lechner, died before her.

Dr. Greene’s books include “The Dialectic of Freedom,” “Landscapes of Learning,” “Teacher As Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age” and “Variations on a Blue Guitar,” a collection of essays on aesthetic education.

A documentary film, “Exclusions & Awakenings: The Life of Maxine Greene,” was released in 2001. But she may be best remembered for her classroom instruction, which drew on personal experience and a wide range of cultural references, from Sartre to Mel Brooks, and inspired a rare kind of loyalty and admiration among generations of students.

“At the very least, students were given access to an active mind, inquiring openly and in full view,” Mr. Ayers wrote in “Doing Philosophy: Maxine Greene and the Pedagogy of Possibility,” an essay that appeared in a 1998 collection, “A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation.”

“Because she harvested her teaching from her own lived experience,” Mr. Ayers went on, “it always had an improvisational feel to it — fresh and vital and inventive, yes, but also firmly rooted in a coherent ground of core beliefs and large purposes. We could see imagination at work, and questioning that knew no limits, and dialectics. And students were invited, if they chose, to join in, to open themselves in dialogue and pursuit.”

Reprinted from Thursday’s early edition.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Maxine Greene, 96, an Educator and Theorist, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe